17. SUCHNESS
SITTING ALONE ON LEAH’S FIRE ESCAPE, I can hear her inside cooking breakfast, the smell of bacon frying, and find myself reflecting on the Buddhist concept of “suchness.” Suchness suggests that things are exactly as they are, and not otherwise — “such” as they are. Much of our unhappiness comes from missing the true essence of things. Take Leah’s tree — it towers over us whenever we’re in her white citadel of a house. Its “suchness” has to do with size. It wraps its arms around the house, folding everything into a hug. Once, during a storm, its enormous leafy branches drenched in water slapped at windows, the walls, and caused the back door to fly open.
The fire escape door swings open and there is Leah, her eyes clear blue as the sky behind her, her blonde hair blowing in the same direction as the giant tree’s branches. She hands me a plate of eggs from the Thompson farm, scrambled the way I like them, along with some of the Thompsons’ bacon and a slice of thick-crusted bread she’s baked. The food’s glorious smell fills my nostrils as she bends down, pushing her hair aside, and sits. Such as she is.
Leah and I had talked about my daughter before we became lovers, but at the time I didn’t wanted to dwell on the topic. But once I’d opened up to Paul Jr. about it, I for some reason felt the need to talk about it more with Leah. She now picked up our previous conversation, saying, “I admire you for taking responsibility for Amaya.”
“How could I not?”
“Do you know how many millions of men wipe their hands of that responsibility completely?”
“Yes, but how many millions more form a family.”
“Is that possible? I mean in this case?”
I’d been over that question so many times in my life. Though Ingrid and I agreed from the beginning we wouldn’t form a traditional family, we hedged on that once we both fell deeply in love with our daughter; we wanted to give her as much of a sense of security as possible. We discussed what it would be like to live together as a family, but luckily both of us had the maturity to know, down deep, that we were far too different in our perspectives and interests to make it work. We knew that if we married we’d likely end up as half of US marriages do, in divorce. What would be better for Amaya? Defining our own clear, respectful co-parenting arrangement from the beginning? Or forming a false togetherness with the likelihood of it later ripping apart, causing much greater pain? To us, the answer was obvious.
Leah took a bite of bacon, and I felt that the tree — hovering heavily over us, over the entire fire escape and house, casting a light green glow around Leah — seemed to be listening to our conversation. I opened up to Leah about something I rarely shared, from my childhood: I’m Bill now, but in grade school I was B-B-Billy. I had a stutter. And this in addition to being a carrot-topped, four-eyed smart kid. “Where ya g-g-going?” kids would call from down the hall, shooting spitballs at the back of my neck. Knowing how awful it feels to be the outcast, to be marginalized, was part of what drew me into helping others and nature through aid work.
My parents’ love got me through the stutter. They wisely went against my teachers’ advice and refused to stick me in speech therapy. Instead of seeing me as damaged goods, they accepted my suchness, stutter and all, until my speech defect healed. Most healing, of ourselves, of our society, is really just holding a space for things to come into alignment.
“Not being a household dad,” I told Leah, “feels like that stutter felt. It was a piece of me that shouldn’t be there.” Even though Ingrid and I took the best course of action given our circumstances, something in me still couldn’t accept the suchness of it. I should be in a nuclear family like my parents; I should be there with Amaya, every single day.
We sat on Leah’s porch, under the gigantic tree, for a long time in silence. Finally, Leah asked: “What’s love?”
I felt blood rush into my chest. I pictured my daughter as an infant, the first time I held her. I said, “You first.”
“It’s something you can’t help. It’s literally ‘falling’ in love. It’s gravity.”
She bit into a strawberry. “I like this,” she said, opening Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, which she’d brought out. “This is love … isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More even, than you love his presence?”
I replied with my own quote from the book: “From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light.”
“You’ve read it.”
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked.
Leah thought for a moment. The other day she’d said to me: “Not a lot of women will tell you this, but the desire to be pregnant is like the desire to eat when you’re starving. And it’s distinct from sexual desire; a physical craving to carry that weight.” She looked at me as she said this, and I had to look away. I felt choked up. We had so much in common, Leah and I, but did I — did we — want more than anam cara, a soul friendship? All I could imagine was this: another child, another continent, loves scattered around the globe. I thought of Paul’s question, about whether I wanted to marry and have more children. A side of me could imagine it, but I hesitated.
“Yes,” Leah finally said, “I’ve been in love. I’ve had my heart broken, and now it’s got these tiny cracks.”
Everything, just then, was illuminated. A squirrel on the brick patio below did little pushups and then froze in the down position, belly to the ground, legs splayed to the sides, absurd. Then it leapt back to life, darting through a yellow-white pattern of insects. The begonias gleamed, and I could smell the white pollen that was fluttering down from the trees, swept up and down in soft air currents, and settling on my jeans. Across the street, teenagers cajoled drivers to hang a left into their benefit carwash. A bird screeched.
“Those cracks,” Leah said. “Light streams out of them.”
“THIS IS MY DAUGHTER,” José said. We were at his house, and he passed me a photo.
La Fea Más Bella was on the TV in the background. Hector played RuneScape on the computer, killing chickens as usual. José told me that Hector was not his only child. His daughter, Ofelia, age eight, had gone back to Mexico with her mom. They’d separated several years ago and split the kids. José showed me a photo of Ofelia in her first communion dress, saying he hadn’t seen her in two years.
I took a photo out of my wallet — Amaya at age two — and handed it to him. He looked at it for a long while. Light filled the room to the muted sounds of video carnage. “She’s an angel,” José finally said.
Somehow there wasn’t much more to say. José changed the channel. Hector came in and sat next to me on the couch, and we watched TV together. Later, I biked into Smithville and called Bolivia on a pay phone.
“Estoy triste” — “I’m sad” — Amaya said. I asked her why. She replied: “Te extraño” — “I miss you.” It’s a parent’s natural instinct to cheer his child up, so I told Amaya how much I missed her and then quickly changed topics. I asked about her preschool, about her kittens and dog (named Skip, after a card in the game Uno). She talked about her simple world for a while. When I finally hung up the phone and gazed across the Quick-N-Easy’s island of gas pumps, I felt a dull, deep ache to be back in Bolivia, close to Amaya.
The next day my Honduran neighbor, Graciela, pulled up to me in a red sports car. She flung open her door — “Hola!” — and launched into a stream of quick Honduran Spanish, heavy on the rr. She cut the engine. All the time in the world. I loved this: instead of rolling down her window, she had her whole door wide open. It seemed so Latin, so open. Her grin was joyous; she’d passed her McDonald’s SafeServe test with a 90 percent score.
“I’m not that literate,” she said, “even in Spanish. And the test was in English. I stayed up until one and got up again at four. Studying!”
“How did you understand the test if you are illiterate?” I asked.
“I can read some of it. And the rest — ¡ el diccionario!” she said
, flipping invisible pages. She boasted that only one in ten passed the test; even many of “the Americans” failed. For passing, she’d get a dollar raise.
“What was on the test?”
“Health stuff. Like bacteria.”
“Now you can forget it all,” I said.
“Oh no!” she said, suddenly serious. “I won’t forget.”
We talked for a long while. At one point a pickup I’d not seen before drove around her car, picked up something in front of her house, and then pulled out past us again and onto Old 117 South. Her mechanic, Graciela said. Their car was in the shop; this red one was her aunt’s.
She has an aunt around here? How lovely that cars circulate freely through the Honduran extended family. It got me nostalgic for Latin America. Now Graciela had an arm and leg dangling casually out of the side of the car. We laughed some more, and then she closed the door and drove along, as casually as when she’d stopped a full forty-five minutes earlier.
ALONE, 12 X 12.
No visitors on the agenda, just an overcast day stretching out all around me, the New Yorker insufficient company. David Sedaris buying pot in a trailer park. I laughed at a sardonic Onion news article Leah had left. The headline read, “Seven Percent of World’s Resources Still Unconsumed”:
A report released Monday by the U.S. Department of the Interior indicates that 7 percent of the natural resources that existed before the dawn of the Industrial Age still remain unconsumed.
“The global environmental crisis has been greatly exaggerated, as there are still plenty of resources to go around,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior Russell Kohl said. “In addition to more than 30 tons of fossil fuel, the planet has literally hundreds of acres of tropical rainforest.”
Exxon celebrated the announcement by spilling the contents of a supertanker.
Then I flipped to a New Yorker cartoon in which a woman was saying to her husband: “Don’t judge me until you’ve walked a mile on my medication.” I laughed dryly, but then felt a pang of sadness. Leah and I had spoken the other day about healing. I told her the term comes from a word meaning “entire” or “complete,” adding that Sartre said that Che Guevara was our era’s “most complete human being.”
“Because Che overcame his own inner shit,” Leah said. “He linked his life to the fate of the poor. And do you know the root of the word therapy? It’s ‘to support ’ or ‘to hold up.’ ”
Over the next several days, as I continued my daily walks on the tracks, through the forest, I felt sensitive all over, like skin blistering. The wound of my separation from Amaya was now exposed. I realized that on one subtle level I was playing the victim: I’d somehow been deprived of a stable, traditional family, of togetherness with Amaya. What nonsense, I realized, as these feelings surfaced during meditation one afternoon. Didn’t all of my life belong?
Later, I watched a spider down by No Name Creek. This clever little spider, I noticed, never built its web between two rocks. A strong wind might then take the web right out. Instead, it always constructed its web between two reeds or blades of grass. That way when the wind gusted through, the web naturally bent with the plant, ducking beneath the breeze and rising back up when it was calm. We can construct our characters in the same way: with definite structure but flexible moorings.
The wind was blowing hard through my life. I had a choice. I could choose to resist, to create a victimhood or other drama out of my separation from my daughter, maybe even going so far as to flee the 12 × 12 and return immediately to Bolivia to feel her love in the flesh and blood. Or, on the other hand, I could accept the imperfection of life, such as it is; like that spider, I could allow the difficult times to blow over and then come back up in the calm. Did it have to be either-or: with Amaya all of the time or none? Could we create a rhythm of togetherness that rose and fell regularly, gracefully?
In an ideal world, Amaya would have Daddy by her side all the time. How did she feel about our separation? I talked about this with Leah, a child of divorced parents who grew up with her mom. Leah said the most important part, for her and for her friends in similar situations, was not the constant presence of both parents, but the feeling that Daddy loves you no matter what, supports you, calls you regularly, and that you sense that he’s got you in his heart. She added that I certainly made the grade in all of those categories. I knew Amaya missed me and wanted to spend more time with me, but I took comfort in the fact that she was secure and healthy and surrounded by love in Bolivia.
While reflecting on this, I received a letter from Jackie. “I’ve made a decision,” she wrote from her desert pilgrimage. “After thirty years I’ve decided to move on from being a physician. I’m giving up the last of the image of me-as-doctor.”
I was astonished to read this. It seemed a radical step. She then wrote a little cryptically that “faithfulness to the path given is the way to learn to love”:
I have been pulled into peace walks, how they blend a passion for being in the natural world with the silence, the discipline of putting one foot in front of another. It’s something in my most activist days I would have made great fun of: “What’s the good of it?”
It’s a big decision. But by leaving work, leaving medicine, I will be free to respond to what is presented in a way not possible before. My sister is moving to a retirement place; I can go down and spend two months helping her transition. I will spend two weeks doing deep cleaning at the Catholic Worker in Birmingham on the way to my sister’s. A humble path seems to open. I’m no longer seeking “high drama.” Like the notion of pilgrimage, I’ll go out of familiar places into what is not known. Follow the path.
FAITHFULNESS TO THE PATH GIVEN
18. SOLITUDE
WHEN I WAS BY MYSELF, I’d sometimes pause to look at the inner walls of the 12 × 12 by candlelight, or regard it from outside as the evening sun warmed its wood siding. The house looked like a sculpture of solitude, art shining through utility. Jackie’s honest choice. She had chipped and carved away the clutter, releasing something essential.
A 12 × 12 doesn’t distract. I recalled my reaction the first time I saw it, the horror of the small. How I craved something that proclaimed the glory of the human, ten thousand square feet in which to lose myself. Jackie, I believe, went into solitude so that her outward life would contain more presence. I already knew about this process from meditation practice. In meditation you sit and allow thoughts to surface, like bubbles in a glass of champagne — and then allow them to float away. A deep well might open up, coal black and filled with dragons. But you maintain presence.
At the 12 × 12 I sometimes thought of Kusasu’s solitude in the Bolivian Amazon. The last speaker of Guarasug’ wé, she once said to me that she had no one left to speak her language with. On the surface it’s axiomatic: she’s the last speaker, hence no one else to speak with. My first emotion was pity. Which chamber of hell is that, where the Flat World has eliminated everyone who speaks your language? Not only are your parents and grandparents and siblings gone — leaving you with only the memories of meals and hanging laundry and trading jokes, all of it still fresh in your mind — but so too is every person you might share those memories with in the language in which they were created.
My pity for Kusasu didn’t last. The light in her eyes dissolved it. I didn’t see any self-pity there, nor any rage against the world that had eliminated her race. She reached out her skinny hand, veined like the air-roots of a cambara, and touched my hand, telling me something through her touch: I’m complete. I may be incomplete as the member of something, but as Kusasu there is nothing missing. Before heading into the Amazon’s seven skies — and, considering her age, it might be soon — she seemed to have found the radically present place of her own solitude.
When you pray, who hears your prayer? You do. Prayer is a concentration of positive thoughts. Once, at the end of an exhausting eight-day yoga retreat, the instructor asked our group: “Do you feel the energy around you?” I did. Muscles burning
, joints oiled, tendons warm and light, I felt an overflowing reservoir of what the Chinese call chi, or vital energy. “That’s your protection,” he said. “Nothing else.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1996, on a break from teaching Native American seventh graders in New Mexico, I volunteered as a human shield in a remote hamlet in the Lacondon jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. It was one of my first experiences with solitude. The previous year, the Mexican military had flown bombing sorties over the Lacondon and killed a thousand people, aiming for Zapatistas and their sympathizers. I was part of a hundreds-strong volunteer team of international observers to simply be in Zapatista villages. The thinking was that the Mexican military would not hesitate to kill innocent Chiapan peasants, but they would not risk the terrible global publicity of slaughtering Italians, French, and Americans. Our presence was “official,” part of the San Andres Peace Accords, but the military refused to recognize us, so Mexican NGO workers had to smuggle me past military checkpoints in the dead of night. Then I had to walk for a full day, deep into the jungle near the Guatemalan border, before finally arriving at my designated village.
All went smoothly to that point. But soon the reality of my role set in. For weeks on end, I had absolutely nothing to do but “be” in the village. My Spanish was terrible back then, so I could hardly communicate. Because Zapatista guerrillas were camped in a secret location right beyond the hamlet, I wasn’t even allowed the pleasure of a hike. So I spent a lot of time on the straw bed in my mud hut reading, thinking, staring at the walls. After a week, I began to go stircrazy. I wanted to at least explore the jungle. I wanted out. After all, I was using my vacation time to do this; I could have been exploring the pyramids at Chichén Itzá, Palenque, and Tikal or scuba diving in Honduras. My vacation time was precious; was I spending it uselessly, in the solitude of a mud hut?
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